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Programs that care for complex patients lack a sustainable source of funding that provides structural flexibility, according to Jeffrey Brenner, MD, executive director of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers. He also mentioned that there had been no gatherings solely dedicated to caring for the most complex patients until The National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs’ Putting Care at the Center conference.

The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report recommends that Medicaid expansion states should direct more attention to smoking cessation programs to improve access and raise awareness about these programs among beneficiaries and providers.

This week, the top stories in managed care included poll results that show growing numbers of Republicans want the Affordable Care Act scaled back instead of repealed, Jardiance received a new indication for patients with type 2 diabetes, and CareMore reported care coordination gaps for seniors.

What we’re reading, December 9, 2016: insurers haven’t taken advantage of 2011 Georgia law allowing interstate policy sales; 6 former executives of Insys Therapeutics arrested for fraudulently boosting sales of their fentanyl drug; with a month left in the year, 2016 has already seen decade-high mumps outbreaks.

Creating effective interventions to care for complex populations and making them available is only half the battle. That was the lesson gleaned from a workshop session at The National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs’ Putting Care at the Center conference, held December 7-9 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

During the first plenary session of Putting Care at the Center, the inaugural conference of The National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs, panelists discussed building new models to care for high-need, high-cost patients.

The American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals sent a joint letter to President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence highlighting the potentially devastating effects a repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could have on community hospitals.

The report finds that if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, many who stand to lose are low-income parents who gained coverage under reforms that extended healthcare to families and raised eligibility to 138% of the federal poverty level.

From the Journals

By using telemedicine and relocating the center of care to where a person lives, we have an opportunity to address more unmet demand for palliative care, while giving more control to the seriously ill to meet their stated needs.

These are uncertain times in healthcare and the anxiety levels of stakeholders remain high as everyone waits to see how the appointments and policy changes within the new administration will impact healthcare in the United States in the near future.

A national assessment of hospital engagement in key domains of interoperability, characteristics associated with engagement in interoperability, and the relationship between interoperability and provider access to clinical data.

It is unclear which barriers cause the greatest threats to the successful implementation of an electronic health record (EHR). This paper prioritizes the potential threats to EHR adoption using a novel analytic strategy: item response theory.